The Parts Men Play eBook

It was almost the last day in August, when the little
British Army was fighting desperately against unthinkable
odds, that a brigade of cavalry made a brave but futile
charge to try to break the German grip. The —­th
Hussars was one of the regiments that took part, and
only a remnant returned.

Staring with fixed, unseeing eyes at the blue of the
sky, which was not unlike the colour of his eyes,
the Honourable Malcolm Durwent lay on the field of
battle, with a bullet through his heart.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE MAN OF SOLITUDE.

I.

In a large room overlooking St. James’s Square
a man sat writing. In the shaded light his face
showed haggard, and his eyes gleamed with the brilliancy
of one whose blood is lit with a fever.

The clocks had just struck nine when he paused in
his work, and crossing to the French windows, which
opened on a little terrace, looked out at the darkened
square. The restless music of London’s
life played on his tired pulses. He heard the
purring of limousines gliding into Pall Mall, and
the vibrato of taxi-cabs whipped into action by the
piercing blast of club-porters’ whistles.
The noise of horses’ hoofs on the pavement
echoed among the roof-tops of the houses, and beneath
those outstanding sounds was the quiet staccato of
endless passing feet, losing itself in the murmur
of the November wind as it searched among the dead
leaves lying in the little park.

He had remained there only a few minutes, when, as
though he had lost too much time already, the writer
returned to the table and resumed his pen.

There was a knock at the door, and he looked up with
a start. ’Come in,’ he said; and
a man-servant entered.

‘Will you be wanting anything, Mr. Selwyn?’

‘No, Smith.’

‘You haven’t been out to dinner, sir.’

‘I am not hungry.’

’Better let me make you a cup of tea with some
toast, and perhaps boil an egg.’

’N—­no, thanks, Smith. Well,
perhaps you might make some coffee, with a little
buttered toast, and just leave them here.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Although less than a year had elapsed since Austin
Selwyn had first dined at Lady Durwent’s home,
experience, which is more cruel than time, had marked
him as a decade of ordinary life could not have done.
His mind had been subjected to a burning ordeal since
summer, and his drawn features and shadowed eyes showed
the signs of inward conflict.

As he had said of himself, all his previous experiences
and education were but a novitiate in preparation
for the great moment when truth challenged his consciousness
and illuminated a path for him to follow. From
an intellectual dilettante, a connoisseur of the many
fruits which grace life’s highway, he had become
a single-purposed man aflame with burning idealism.
From the sources of heredity the spirit of the Netherlands
fighting against the yoke of Spain, and the instinct
of revolt which lies in every Celtic breast, flowed
and mingled with his own newly awakened passion for
world-freedom.